After one full day on South Georgia the four days at sea are forgotten. The majority of the day was spent at Right Whale Bay with a few thousand king penguins, several hundred elephant seals, and assorted fur seals, giant petrels, skuas, and others. There was both life and death on the beach — elephant seals were being born while king penguin chicks were being attacked and killed by giant petrels. In the evening we made a short hike across a narrow portion of the island that ended with slides down the steep side of a mountain and to the zodiac waiting at the beach.
I don’t want to go overboard about how amazing this place and the wildlife here is (and both deserve any superlative you can think of) but while hiking it struck me that South Georgia is a tremendously lonely place, but not a place in which one feels alone. The island is a bit of rock at the bottom of the world, mostly covered in ice, freezing cold, and yet the sense of wonder here is that child-like sense of how incredible and full of potential life is. It’s a lonely place in that the solitude is as complete as it could possibly be, but at the same time it’s filled with peacefulness and possibility, rather than hopelessness. The world I’ve left, in which meetings and timelines seemed important, is a place where I’ve always felt very alone, while here on the bottom of the world there is only a sense of awe and amazement.
